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AbstractThis study employs the V‐Dem database and proposes an alternative calculation of the regular Electoral Democracy Index by incorporating the Direct Popular Vote Index, a component of the Participatory Democracy Index. The result is the creation of the Plebiscitary Electoral Democracy Index. To validate this index proposal, the article conducts an empirical test focusing on the Andean Community countries over the past two decades that compares the existing Electoral Democracy Index with the new proposed index from 2003 to 2022. The findings reveal that the proposed index reflects a consistently lower level of democracy than that measured by the Electoral Democracy Index across all Andean cases. This research shows how incorporating participation indicators in assessing electoral democracy reveals distinct conclusions regarding the state of democracy than those from the previously established Electoral Democracy Index. The comparatively lower levels of democracy emphasize the importance of incorporating a participatory dimension in the Electoral Democracy Index to develop a more comprehensive and regionally nuanced approach to measuring democracy that can be applied to understand better the evolution of democracy everywhere.

Within democratic theory, electoral competition is typically associated with minimalist and realist views of democracy. In contrast, this article argues for a reinterpretation of electoral competition as an important element of an egalitarian theory of democracy. Current relational egalitarian theories, in focusing on the equalization of individual power-over, present electoral institutions as in tension with equality. Against this view, the article contends that electoral competition can foster equality by incentivizing the equalization of cooperative power. The article develops the normative category of equal opportunity to access cooperative power and shows how it can generate an egalitarian defense of electoral competition. Yet this ideal is not an affirmation of the status quo. Rather, it points to the need to reform electoral systems to make them more competitive and so more likely to foster cooperative power, as well as reforms to provide direct support to associations like unions that equalize cooperative power.